Coming face to face with the famous and infamous at waxworks
ON HOLIDAY a year or two ago I visited Barcelona Waxworks and I must say that I was really disappointed.
It was nothing like the Cardiff Continental Waxworks that used to be in St Mary Street two or three doors from the Royal Hotel.
Although I was only 10 years old when it closed in 1946, it made a lasting impression on me. And I wasn’t the only one – as John Phillips, an expert in marionettes, writing in a magazine called Animations some years ago, recalled: “I remember the Waxworks at 90 St Mary Street, as being the most theatrical I have ever seen – Musee Grevin, in Paris notwithstanding.
“Together with the usual array of celebrities – royalty and stars of stage and screen – there was Alfred the Gorilla, the Tattooed Lady of Port Said, the Torture of the Hooks and several automata and illusions, particularly the transformation of Dr Jekyll into Mr Hyde.”
The waxworks exhibition was on two floors, reached by a steep stairs from the street, and the premises had originally been used as a rather superior Temperance music hall.
When the waxworks first came to Cardiff in 1866 they were known as D’arc’s Grand Waxwork Exhibition.
Later, Louis Tussaud exhibited there for a short while.
William D’arc was an uncle of Mrs Esme Barron, who recalled: “Uncle William made all his own figures and the behind-the-scenes room was always littered with various pieces of wax anatomy.
“My aunt Edith did the dressing of the figures.
“I remember well the policeman
who looked down the stairs, the magnificent tableau of the Last Supper and the large stuffed polar bear which hugged you if you put a penny in the slot.
“There was also a genuine French guillotine and one of the finest replicas of the Crown
Jewels.”
For Richard Brain, the Chamber of Horrors “with its half light and imagined smell of hate and murder, its cut-up bits of a corpse in the barrel and a man in the electric chair gave one the creeps”.
At the time the waxworks closed down, it was owned by Mr Beryl Lewis and his daughter, Sybil, who told me that some of the exhibits ended up in Billy Butlin’s holiday camps.
One famous visitor to the waxworks on the first of his three visits to Cardiff was Colonel William Frederick Cody, better known as Buffalo Bill.
This was in 1891, when sharpshooter Annie Oakley was in his Wild West Show, but whether she accompanied him I cannot say.
In 1975 on a visit to his homeland, Hollywood’s Ray Milland, who was from Neath, told an Echo reporter that he remembered being taken there as a young lad.
Some of the wax effigies that I recall were of Hitler, Mussolini, George Formby, Lloyd George, Tom Mix, Clark Gable, Joan of Arc and Sir Gordon Richards, the famed champion jockey whom I had the pleasure of meeting in the flesh, so to speak, many years later at a Chepstow Racecourse press luncheon.
Eileen Summerfield, who used to be a cashier there, told me many years ago: “I worked there before the war and we had lots of fun.
“Saturday nights were busy, especially when the big rugby matches were played at the Arms Park.”
The exhibits she remembered best were those of Charles Dickens, Oliver Cromwell, Tom Thumb, Tom Walls and Madame Butterfly.
On March 24, 1946, the entire show was sold off and I remember seeing some of the exhibits at Coney Beach, Porthcawl.
Esme Barron back in 1987 took her grandchildren to London’s Madame Tussauds, where she said she saw “some familiar pieces”.
She also believed that some of the other exhibits were sold to someone in France. Perhaps the Joan of Arc exhibit was one of them!
Unfortunately, photographs of the exhibits that were in the Cardiff Continental Waxworks are very, very rare, which is a great shame.
■ If you remember the Cardiff Continental Waxworks I would be pleased to hear from you.